After United Mobile

[monkeyboy]

Originally Posted by inquisitor

The main problem of all those roaming discounters is, that there are too few potential customers and the regulation of roaming tariffs by the EU has reduced their number. With the further decline of voice roaming tariffs in the EU and the new caps for data roaming tariffs including SMS they are successively becoming less attractive. All in all I think the whole roaming discount segment will disappear sooner or later.

Of course a big killer of the market is VOIP. Services like Skype are simply fantastic and dirt cheap/essentially free. So as long as you have Internet access, it is really pointless to make your calls any other way. It doesn't solve all int'l roaming phone usage, but it easily diverts 50% of the usage or more.

[bbob]

Originally Posted by monkeyboy

Of course a big killer of the market is VOIP. Services like Skype are simply fantastic and dirt cheap/essentially free. So as long as you have Internet access, it is really pointless to make your calls any other way. It doesn't solve all int'l roaming phone usage, but it easily diverts 50% of the usage or more.

I agree voip is a good alternative but 50% no way, maybe 10%. When on the road in your car you can't really use voip. You have to find an access point first and range is limited.
Sure some hotels offer free wireless but the more expensive ones just let you pay for internet, so gone are the savings.

No voip is nice but when travelling you want to call and be called anywhere and that is the biggest limit of voip through internetaccess.

[f300]

I am both sorry for United Mobile and mildly annoyed. I understand they are probably caught between a rock and a hard place and they can't possibly make a viable business with free incoming.
But this goes both ways. One of the great features of United Mobile/Riiing was that you were called for free in so many countries. For this we were willing to put up with unreliable network, different (and expensive) phone number and poor support resembling an "apartment company" not a phone operator.
But now for EU where a big chunk of the "roaming market" is (because countries are small and so easy to cross borders) because of regulations most prices are capped now by law (and will be even lower in the future). So even if you take the most inefficient "local" SIM and use it in roaming in EU you can still get some calls out of a 15 EUR recharge.
For more exotic places people adapt. You have your "normal" mobile with you but use it only for emergencies because it's expensive (but that's no surprise, it has been like this for as long there was roaming and there was a time when there was NO roaming at any price). The rest you can easily take care over skype and such.
Even if disappointing there's no big tragedy that UM went this way. In the end maybe I'll even feel better, I'll take my UM+ number out from my business card (it was anyway confusing people and the SIM was off most of the time), I'll take the SIM out of my wallet and not have to decide which one to use (or whether I should carry two phones) when I travel. Good riddance.

[adam917]

Originally Posted by MATHA531

My head is spinning from all this. I grant you I'm not a geek but interested in good value for my money. I never suspected that if I buy an international sim putting money up front and basically only use it to receive calls in those areas where they advertise it's free to receive I am violating any tariff or something like that. Is that what is being said here? Isn't this similar to a bait and switch plan when restrictions such as this are buried?

And it's almost something like I once read from an executive at one USA gsm carrier. He was asked how you could afford to give people unlimited use at whatever the rate was at that point. He said because the average person who uses unlimited never (or almost never) reaches the level he or she would if they used prepaid. It's far more profitable for them to give unlimited say for $80/month rather than 500 minutes @ 15¢/minute and that most people even with unlimited never gets to 500 minutes!

I bought a United Mobile card, put up 25€ or whatever up front...they have the €25, use it mostly to receive for free, they have €25 they wouldn't have if I haven't bought the card and also don't they get a piece of the termination fees when I receive?

Chalk me up as one confused hombre.

You should remember that we in the US often get unlimited night-time (usually running from as early as 19:00 and ending the next morning, sometimes as late as 09:00) & weekend minutes to any domestic phone, and some people really take advantage of that. One person I know uses around 10'000 (yes, ten thousand) night/weekend minutes and maybe 200 daytime minutes every month. If they had to pay for each minute, the price per minute would work out to an extremely cheap eight tenths of one cent on our current plan, even less on months which more time were used. I don't know how tarriffs are in most other countries but I bet that even having unlimited incoming calls isn't as good in the end when you are used to using a mobile phone like you would a land-line. The average price per minute is probably much higher. We got rid of our landline due to the mobile rates being that good.